Brother Jed finds a formidable foe in 'delightfully ghoulish' Granby
By Jason McMahon The Independent
MADISON, Wis. — Widely recognized sidewalk preacher "Brother Jed" became another face in the crowd at the University of Wisconsin Wednesday, cutting short a sermon to listen to a speech from a quirky coroner candidate.
George Edward Smock, known as Brother Jed at more than 600 college campuses nationwide, was in the middle of one of his trademark fiery orations when UW-Madison student Ben Granby addressed the gathering throng at Library Mall.
Brother Jed, seasoned in the way of confrontation, initially tried to drown out Granby’s shouts by increasing his own volume. When it became apparent Granby would not go away, Jed turned his focus on the young man, warning that Granby would "weep and wail in the bowels of hell."
Unfazed, Granby went on while Jed reluctantly yielded the bully pulpit and pulled up a chair, joining a crowd that had swelled four-fold in a matter of minutes.
Granby, the Republican candidate for Dane County Coroner, spoke with his mouth frothing with blood and was cloaked in a blood-stained lab coat. Granby’s assistant, a grossly deformed hunchback, walked the crowd sipping formaldehyde.
The 22-year-old Granby was trying to drum up support for his attempt to unseat 10-year coroner Ray Wosepka. The Democratic incumbent has earned the endorsements of each of the Madison daily newspapers, though The Capital Times did admit that Granby’s campaign was "delightfully ghoulish" and that Wosepka was "a bore."
Granby warned the audience of the increasing numbers of zombies walking among us, and accused Wosepka of being a "zombie-loving communist democrat." He became agitated when a suspected zombie walked past the rally.
Concerned with the ballooning budget of the coroner’s office, Granby vowed to cut costs and offered several options to do so.
He promised to offer a "home-coroner kit" in every home, so that citizens can pronounce loved ones or neighbors dead without having to call the authorities.
Granby plans to thwart overcrowding in the county morgue by storing dead bodies in his basement, which he said was "pretty cold." He was non-committal as to what he would do with the cadavers when he was off-duty.
Granby also outlined his educational agenda, which includes an effort to increase public awareness about human carcasses and their intricate parts.
"The people deserve to know what goes into frozen yogurt," he shouted.
Granby also plans to show decaying bodies in local schools.
Brother Jed, meanwhile, watched Granby’s freak show with only mild astonishment.
"This is really something," Jed said.
Literature distributed by Granby’s camp describes the lifelong Madison resident’s other goals as such:
o Offer internships to grade schoolers
o Provie cheap fertilizer
o Ship in discreet packaging
o Push for post-mortem partnership status
If there were still any undecided voters in the crowd, Granby offered up one more reason to vote for his ticket.
"At least I never fucked a corpse," he claimed.
Granby is best known for founding the clownish campus organization The Order of the Ten-Fat Tigers.
The group rose to prominence last year, when it erected a 15-foot penis outside the chancellor’s office in response to a tuition hike.
The act was presumably intended to convey the message that students are being screwed by the university administration.
Brother Jed, who resumed his exhortation with his story of Dick, Jane and Sally shortly after Granby finished, sees it differently.
"I think the public is being screwed by the students," he said.
Granby would neither confirm nor deny if he has ever screwed the public, only maintaining that he’s never done it after they’ve died.
